No. 2194

Saddle of Venison—Roasted

Selle de Chevreuil Rotie

Unless the meat is far advanced it is unnecessary to marinate it; simply pare the pieces and suppress the skin so as to be able to lard the flesh with larding pork, either crosswise or lengthwise, with lardons. Saddles and quarters of venison are roasted either on the spit or in the oven, basting over with butter. A small saddle of venison takes forty minutes to cook. Roasted venison is served either with a clear gravy (No. 404), a brown sauce (No. 414) with lemon juice added, or else a sauce prepared with the stock it was cooked in, mingled with half-glaze (No. 400), then reduced with raw cream and finished with lemon juice or a dash of vinegar. Or it can also be served with currant jelly dissolved in espagnole sauce (No. 414) and port wine.

← No. 2193 Saddle of Venison, Port Wine Sauce and Curra Venison & Large Game No. 2195 Venison Grenadins a la Royale—Tenderloin →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional larder: a butcher's saddle, a supply of pork fat for larding, and a stockpot of espagnole and half-glaze standing ready. Stripped of that scaffolding, the instruction that matters is the one about fat and timing.

The hinge: fat and donenessVenison saddle has almost no intramuscular fat and goes dry and liver-flavored past medium rare. Ranhofer gives forty minutes for a small saddle but specifies no oven heat; work to an internal temperature of 125-130F at the thickest part of the loin instead, and rest it 15 minutes.
"Unless the meat is far advanced"This means unless the venison has been hung long enough to grow high. Marinating was a way to mask age; farmed or promptly chilled venison needs none, so his default of skipping the marinade is the right one today.
Larding, and what to do insteadLardons of hard back fat threaded through the meat with a larding needle keep it moist. If you have no needle, barding works nearly as well: tie thin sheets of pork fatback or unsmoked bacon over the loins and remove them for the last ten minutes to let the surface color.
Suppress the skin"Suppress" here renders the French supprimer, to remove. The skin meant is most likely the tough membrane over the loin, which contracts in the heat and is best pared off with a thin blade.
Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in the instruction. For a modern oven, roast hot, 425-450F, so the exterior browns before the interior overshoots.
The cross-referenced saucesNo. 404 is a clear roast gravy, No. 400 a half-glaze (reduced brown stock), No. 414 espagnole, the flour-thickened brown mother sauce. A modern kitchen can substitute a good reduced game or veal stock; the acid finish, lemon juice or a dash of vinegar, is not optional, since it is what keeps a rich sauce from flattening against the meat.
YieldA saddle of roe deer, the chevreuil of the title, is a small joint and will serve only a few; a saddle from a larger deer will feed more and needs proportionally longer, so cook to temperature rather than to the clock.

A Little History

Selle de chevreuil is specifically the saddle of roe deer, the small European deer long prized in the French kitchen, and Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, kept the French name for the dish. The Epicurean (1894) devotes an unusually long stretch to large game because game was still a restaurant luxury with real seasonality, before the market-hunting bans of the early twentieth century largely ended its commercial sale in the United States. The larding described here is the oldest answer to the problem of a lean animal: pork fat inserted directly into the muscle, a technique general in European cookery for centuries and now mostly displaced by barding, brining, and low-temperature roasting. The sweet-tart currant-and-port finish is likewise old, and is often traced to the medieval habit of pairing game with fruit and vinegar rather than to any single chef.